New Right, Old Bottles?

Posted By
Matt Parrott
On
September 24, 2012 @ 12:02 am
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North American New Right |
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1,063 words

[1]I recently participated in an interesting discussion[2] with Lew, one of our more insightful commenters. One thread in the discussion was whether or not a future order should reject America’s ideals and institutions altogether or incrementally evolve America’s constitutional and republican framework into compliance with our racialist and Traditionalist principles.

While I understand that outlining our future regime may seem preposterous given our meager position, I also believe that making progress requires arriving at a coherent vision, sketching up a roadmap, and then marching forward . . . rather than merely critiquing the current state of affairs.

[3]While studying user interface design for my programming work, I came across an interesting concept: skeuomorphism. In the context, it was referring to Apple’s habit of borrowing its user interface styles from real world objects. Its e-readers look like books, complete with the crease in the middle and dog-eared pages. Its calendar application is bound with virtual leather and even features the little tatters of ripped pages to help the user feel more at home in the new context.

That’s skeuomorphism: “a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.”

Skeuomorphism in user interface design serves a valuable role in easing the transition from tangible to virtual interfaces. But skeuomorphism is even used between digital contexts. For instance, my latest version of Excel shows a floppy disk as the save icon, despite their being entirely obsolete.

I believe this concept can help frame and guide political discourse, both in explaining historical and contemporary political frameworks and in planning for future ones. I believe we too easily accept political ideals and institutions at face value, failing to distinguish between the underlying mechanisms at work and the superficial interfaces we’re presented with.

Perhaps one prime example of a skeuomorph is “Marxism.” There was never much structural similarity between the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castro’s Cuba. Most of ideological Marxism is tangential to the real work of designing a functional political order, and much of what it did prescribe proved unworkable in practice. Marxism could be any and every political order which is opposed (at least in theory) to Western capitalists. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by one ethnic tribe against another. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by one socioeconomic class against another. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by ethnic nationalists against foreign interlopers.

I believe our American government has been overthrown multiple times, while always maintaining its skeuomorphic artifice. The founding documents and institutions evolved only incrementally in the wake of the American Civil War, and yet a distributed confederation of sovereign states became a federation of mere administrative districts. Just as you can slide your finger across your iPhone and confirm that its calendar has the texture of glass rather than leather, the texture of our current regime is entirely unrelated to the founding documents it purports to be the emergent product of.

You still have the process of voting for representatives who design laws which are then reviewed by the judicial branch and executed by the executive branch . . . but the process only works in a superficial manner. For instance, voters have consistently opposed the “Dream Act” amnesty. There are certain matters, immigration, monetary policy, foreign policy, and race relations which transcend this process. These are matters that the regnant oligarchy handle directly. They do their best to frame things in the system’s patterns and paradigms, but these things are simple too important to entrust to the people the Constitution entrusts it to.

Like a fool attempting to tear a page from his iPhone’s calendar by pinching at the corner of the screen, we vote and lobby for sensible immigration reform, only to have the oligarchy offer an arbitrary ad hoc rationalization for its decision to grant the amnesty in spite of the process.

Neither party campaigns on a platform of globalist “free trade” policies . . . and yet both parties end up supporting them.

Public opinion polls confirm that the American people are war-weary, and they voted for a President who campaigned on a platform of pursuing a more humble foreign policy. Heck, even George W. Bush himself originally campaigned on a humble foreign policy platform.

[4]No matter which button you press on the interface, this machine will output more immigration, more cannibal capitalism, more globalism, and more war.

This situation is very disconcerting to those who value this country’s founding ideals because it reveals that the ideals are no longer respected by the elites.

For myself and others in the New Right, what’s disconcerting is not that the elites are deciding against the will of the people, but that the elites are deciding against the welfare of the people. The elites aren’t merely second-guessing the people, they’re alien to and hostile to the people.

Were we to take it back, what would we change symbolically? How different would our “America” (or subset of America comprised of former Americans) appear from theirs?

The Jewish and capitalist oligarchs are managing to run a government superficially similar to the Constitution’s specifications without making the error of adopting its principles and parts which are incompatible with their aims. I see no reason why we couldn’t achieve a similar feat, delivering a merely evolutionary change to the government’s exoteric elements while delivering a revolutionary change to its esoteric elements. While walking through a large war memorial in Indianapolis a few months ago, I noticed that the chiseled limestone carving of a bald eagle was confidently clutching a batch of arrows. While it’s not exactly a fasces, its symbolism is integrally fascist.

[5]

While we should definitely look forward to toppling the godawful monument to MLK blighting our nation’s capitol, I believe some of the most enduring symbols can and should be adopted and adapted. Keep the bald eagle, but have her defiantly clutching a fasces. Keep the Statue of Liberty[6], but unceremoniously pry off the subversive Jewish poem attached to her and replace it with an ode to our European fatherlands. Keep the stars and stripes, plucking the stars which will then belong to the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Republica del Norte, New Liberia, or whatever. We can’t guess at this early hour exactly how the revolution will take shape, but I won’t object if that shape superficially resembles what our people are comfortable and familiar with.